Discreet Signaling: From the Chinese Emperors to the Internet

Abstract

For thousands of years, humans have sought means to secretly communicate. Today, ad hoc signaling methods are used in applications as varied as digital rights management for multimedia, content identification, authentication, steganography, transaction tracking, and networking. This talk will present an information-theoretic framework for analyzing such problems and designing provably good signaling schemes. Key ingredients of the framework include models for the signals being communicated and the degradations, jammers, eavesdroppers and codebreakers that may be encountered during transmission.